Fort Collins City Council takes bag ban off the table

Cardboard recycling mandate advances.

Nov. 27, 2012

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Fort Collins City Council backed away from banning disposable bags Tuesday in favor of education efforts geared toward recycling them and reducing their use. But council moved ahead with a proposal to require citizens and businesses to recycle cardboard.

Council directed staff to draft proposals for future votes on both concepts, which aim to reduce the environmental impact of consumers’ habits in accordance with the city’s plan to reduce landfill waste.

Even the most environmentally conscious council members were more inclined to support encouraging reduced use and increased recycling of disposable bags than to back a ban.

“It’d probably be an overreach to ban plastic bags in the city of Fort Collins,” Mayor Pro Tem Kelly Ohlson said, expressing support for imposing a fee on their use to support public education on the consequences on waste and recycling programs while slowing the use of disposable bags.

City staff estimates that 50 million disposable bags annually are issued to customers of retail operations, with about 60 percent of the bags coming from grocery stores.

Council began the night with four options for regulating disposable bags:

• An education campaign that includes purchase and distribution of durable bags to citizens that would reduce disposable bag consumption by an estimated 5 percent.

• A ban on disposable bags (both paper and plastic) that could dramatically reduce their use but would likely generate objections and possibly spur lawsuits by affected industries.

• Imposing a fee or tax on disposable bags, similar to the 10-cent-per-bag price recently adopted by Boulder. This approach would provide a substantial reduction in the use of disposable bags over time, but could prove burdensome to lower-income consumers.

• Requiring or encouraging grocers to offer customers a discount for not using disposable bags, similar to the 5-cent-per-bag credit currently offered at Sprouts markets in Fort Collins.

Only the ban was scratched from the list of options.

The cardboard recycling campaign, if adopted, could eliminate an estimated 12,000 tons of trash a year from the city’s waste stream. That represents a commodity price of more than $500,000 a year for recycled cardboard, and an annual reduction in landfill fees of $216,000, according to a report by city staff.

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Earlier this year, a building code adopted by city council took effect requiring cardboard recycling at construction sites. The proposal before council would extend the mandate to residential and commercial trash customers, although residential customers generally have actively recycled cardboard for years at a very high rate, according to Susie Gordon, the city’s senior environmental planner.

“It’s more the businesses in this community for whom it’s just too inconvenient,” and therefore need encouragement, she said.

Many apartment complexes and small to mid-size businesses would likely need to add recycling to their trash service to comply with the requirement, and could see their monthly bills rise by $10 to $40, according to the city staff report.

The city is amenable to working with businesses and apartment complexes new to recycling cardboard waste by crafting tailored compliance plans. Staff discussed some potential examples, including allowing clusters of businesses to share compacting equipment and city-sponsored loans at low or no interest to enable the purchase or lease of recycling equipment.

The proposal currently envisions trash hauling companies as the eyes of enforcement, with the expectation that they would notify customers who violate the mandate. City code enforcement officers would issue warnings initially, with increased consequences — particularly for repeat offenders — after an 18-month acclimation period.

Nine states prohibit disposal of cardboard in landfills. More than 50 cities regulate disposable bags to some degree.